The Business Lesson Hidden Inside Every Rainstorm

What do you do when there is absolutely nothing you can do?

It’s one of the most important questions a business owner will ever face.

And most people get the answer wrong.

In 2018, William bought a Jeep Wrangler. Manual transmission, removable top, removable doors. Everything he’d always wanted. That summer he drove to work with the top off and the doors off, wind in his hair, enjoying every minute of it. Until the afternoon storms rolled in.

If you’ve ever spent a summer in the South, you know what happens. A clear morning turns into a wall of rain by 3pm with no warning. And when you’re sitting in stop and go traffic on Interstate 77 in a topless Jeep, there’s exactly one thing you can do about it.

Nothing.

You sit there. You get soaked. And you wait for it to pass.

The Answer That Changed Everything

His son asked him once what happens when it rains. And William’s answer became one of the most useful things he carries into every difficult stretch in business.

“Sometimes it rains, son. And sometimes there is nothing you can do except sit there and laugh.”

That’s not resignation.

That’s clarity.

Because one of the most expensive things a business owner can do during a rainstorm is panic, overreact, or make a decision just to feel like they are doing something. The storm doesn’t care. And the decisions made in the middle of it are rarely the right ones.

What This Actually Looks Like in Business

Every business owner goes through rainstorms:

  • Markets shift
  • A key employee walks out
  • A client relationship falls apart
  • A deal that was supposed to close doesn’t

Sometimes multiple things go wrong at once and none of it is your fault and none of it is within your control.

The instinct in those moments is to fix something, anything, just to feel less helpless. But the business owners who come out the other side in the best shape are almost always the ones who acknowledged the storm, stayed steady, and kept moving without letting the rain make their decisions for them.

It Always Stops

That’s the other part of the lesson.

Every afternoon storm in the South is gone within 15 minutes. You end up soaking wet, maybe a little embarrassed, but the sun’s already coming back out before you have had time to fully process what just happened.

The same is true in business. The rainstorms that feel like they are going to drown everything always pass. And when they do, the owners who laughed through it are already moving while the ones who panicked are still wringing out their shirts.

Next time a rainstorm hits your business, remember the Jeep.

Sit in it.

Laugh a little.

And know that it is going to stop.

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Some of you might know, birth year is 1978. We won’t go on a birth date ’cause, you know, all the password identity thr- um, fraud, and now I don’t ever use my birthday as my password, but another story for another day. 1978. So 2018, I was 40 years old and had just lost my dad. I’d had a Chevy Tahoe for 11 years.

Uh, we should tell that story one day about my Chevy Tahoe. Best purchase I ever made. It was running thin, midlife crisis, lost my dad, so what do you do? You buy the car that you wanted, um, earlier in life, and so I bought a, a 2018 Jeep Wrangler. I wanted a manual, so I got a manual, and I wanted to be able to take the top off, ride around with the top off.

You know, I wanted the wind blowing my hair and that type of stuff, right? And [00:01:00] um, I remember at that point in time I was working with a, a firm north of the city up in Davidson, and I’d take the top off and, you know, in the morning and not want to put it back on. Take the doors off, too, right? Take the doors off, the top off, and kind of ride around, let the wind blow in my hair and all those things.

And on a number of occasions, summertime, coming back home in the South, oftentimes what happens is rainstorm, right? Just a little pop-up shower. And definitely got caught in, I don’t know, four, five, six different rainstorms or stop-and-go traffic. You can see it, but there’s nothing you can do, right? Like, where are you gonna go?

You’re in stop-and-go traffic in the city on Interstate 77, and you just sit there and take it. So anyways, got caught in a few of those, and I remember, uh, my son asked me one time, he said, “Dad, you know, what happens if it rains?” And I was like, “Well, son, it’s kinda like life, you know? [00:02:00] Sometimes it’s gonna rain.”

And he was like, “Well, what do you mean?” I was like, “Well, sometimes it rains and you’re in the car, and it’s just like when things go wrong in life. Like, there’s nothing you can… Sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it except sit there and laugh in the rain.” And so I think about that a lot and its relevance to, you know, basic aspects of life and certainly basic aspects for running a business, right?

Sometimes it rains, and there’s really nothing you can do about it. Um, and you just have to get through, right? You have to sit there in the rain. You have to learn how to laugh a little bit, and you push through, and next thing you know, it’s a afternoon summer storm in the South, and 15 minutes later you’re soaking wet, but at least it’s not raining anymore.

So as you sit there going through your rainstorm this week, next week, next month, whenever it ends up being, uh, just remember that, you know, sometimes it rains, and sometimes the best thing you can possibly do is acknowledge that it’s raining, [00:03:00] chuckle to yourself a little bit, and realize that one day it’s gonna stop raining, too

ORIGINAL MEDIA SOURCE(S):

William Bissett: Sometimes It Rains: What a Jeep Taught Me About Business | Portus Perspectives

Originally Recorded on August 5, 2026

Portus Perspectives: Episode 38

By /Published On: October 8, 2026/